LONDON, UK. Preprints, papers uploaded to the internet before they are peer reviewed, are definitely shit, according to a group of publishing companies who have a vested interest in seeing them fail.

“The problem with preprints, is, well they’re just shit aren’t they?” said a representative from Nurture Profits Group (NPG). “They haven’t got the sheen of quality that our career-editors and pompous reviewers add”.

When pushed for an example, she said “Preprints are too long, there are too many references, too many technical words, too much damn science. People don’t want to read that shit. What you need is a good editor to strip out 85-90% of the content, which goes in the supplement, and needlessly reduce the number of references. We also need to get all of those massive tables into PDF format, and insist on impossible, contradictory image specifications” she finished.

Academic publishers have been criticized recently for forcing researchers into unpaid slave labour, reviewing papers that they themselves have to pay to read, even after they have signed over copyright to their own content. It is a system so perfectly controlling and exploitative that even the Catholic church have praised it.